Small Acts of Disappearance (10 page)

Teresa's nineteen-year-old angst at the opening of the book (‘You offend my honour! I would kill anyone who offends my honour…Honour is more sacred than life,' she exclaims
in the earliest scene) I first read as out-moded and overblown; almost a decade later, I recognised this sense of grasping, this need for something more, as the pulsing bass-line to so much of my life, even if the language has been different. And it's so simple for eating, the most basic, daily ritual, to become entangled in that striving, that separation. Early in the novel, Teresa refuses wine at her cousin's wedding, and her denial immediately sets her apart. Her denial makes her powerful, and it makes her strangely sensual: ‘Teresa looked at them proudly; she felt immortal. The world was like a giant egg of golden glass, she could crush it. She floated; she looked at them, gleaming.'

Teresa's hunger, and her striving are always this sensual, and always linked to love – this is hunger as a yearning, as desire made physically manifest. ‘Shall I die hungry?' she asks, thinking about the passion that the cold and distant Jonathan cannot show her. But more than this yearning, more than these horribly familiar character traits, what I recognised in my second reading of the book was how Teresa's walking, to and from work, shifts, in those perilously small increments, from something primarily practical – a frugality with money – to something mostly about achievement, striving, a frugality of the body. More and more, Teresa's walking becomes a way to prove that she is strong, that she is worthy of the love she craves, that she is earning her right to make choices, her right to exist, step by step, even as she physically shrinks away. It is as if she walks her way to England, and this is proof of her selflessness, because it is, at its core, a kind
of self-annihilation. Very quickly, she stops walking for love alone, for the burning hope that she might be loved. ‘She was not now walking only to save money.' Stead writes. ‘She was outstripping illness and failure.'

That's what hunger does for people like Teresa, and for people like me. It outstrips failure, or at the very least, it makes failure something that is contingent, beyond our control: if we fail when we are hungry, we only fail because we are ill, not because of something that is lacking in ourselves. It's a strange kind of power hunger gives us – beyond that physical drivenness, hunger allows us to hold our potential
as
potential. Hunger keeps our potential untested – and limitless – because we can never access it entirely.

But more importantly, in another of those strange inversions that eating disorders offer, Teresa's hunger is a kind of sacrifice of the physical to bring her closer to a metaphysical ideal. Hunger is a measurable achievement when achievement is usually something far more abstract and ill-defined; hunger is a constant where Teresa can only be uncertain, of her purpose, her place, of Jonathan's love. Hunger is a constant reminder of what she wants, or what she's waiting for and working towards. It is grounding, it is stable, and it can be held onto, relied upon, like nothing else that Teresa has ever known.

It's important, too, that Teresa is not the only character in
For Love Alone
to equate – or at least align – hunger with love.
Soon after Teresa's arrival in London, she and Jonathan go the theatre together, and return to his bed-sit. After chastising Teresa for ‘doing nothing with herself' in the years she had been saving, Jonathan begins to talk about his university life and work:

Someone…says the relation between the sexes is based on food. Savages only have their women once or twice a year. Their food is poor. All that about love-life of the savages is balderdash for mammy-pappy consumption in the suburbs. Love is an illusion, love is food. Savages don't love. It's due to an overplus of calories, we eat more than we need…Some of the superfluidity goes to the brains, the nerves, and we get love, sighs, groans. Primitive love – raw fish, Cockney love – fish and chips, middle-class love – cottage pudding, the grand passion – roast duckling and port wine.

For Jonathan, love is a kind of hunger, its satiation something he imagines only in terms of food. For so many of the years I was unwell, I was too savage to love, and kept all of my appetites unsatiated.

Similarly, Teresa's family consider her sick body as both caused by, and the cause of, the fact that she ‘hasn't got a man'. In the final year of her walking, she withdraws further from her family, eating most of her meals in seclusion (a classic eating disorder symptom), or else watching on silently as they argue over the meal table:

‘Terry's going mad,' said the brother…The way she's going on, she must be going mad.'

‘Women go mad if they don't get married,' said the father. ‘It isn't their fault. If Terry would get herself up a bit, make herself more attractive, she'd probably get a nibble, but she can't expect men to go after a bag of bones. Now Terry was quite beefy when she was sixteen, she was quite an eyeful.

‘The brother', as he is called most often, takes this even further:

Yes, it's your fault because you're so ugly, mangy, thin as a skeleton…It's your fault. Look at your hair and the hollows in your cheeks, you can almost see your teeth through your cheeks. I've seen you bathing, you can almost count every rib you've got, your arms are like sticks, your legs are like broomsticks, it's your own fault no man will have you.

Teresa's family sees her thinness not as a misplaced act of striving, but as something hysterical, her shrivelled body as directly linked with her stymied sexuality. They are, perhaps, partially correct – but only in that Teresa's hunger is a wanting, a long desire. Although the body does become the most obvious expression of these illnesses, it is also, in a way, the least important. Hunger is, I think, always an attempt to transcend the body, to become something other, something more.

Metaphors of eating are prevalent throughout
For Love Alone.
A description of Teresa's adolescent love of reading (which is, incidentally, held partly to blame for her high ideals) refers to her as having ‘eaten into her few years'; an early family reprimand is ‘Eat your soup and don't be a fool.' One of Teresa's most vivid childhood memories is of barges in the harbour, glimpsed on her way to school, dumping excess fruit into the water, to ‘fall among the fishes,' a waste that's particularly resonant given what lies ahead for her body.

On Jonathan's part, his descriptions of and railings against his poverty are constantly figured around food – he tells Teresa early on that he always eats at home because it's all he can afford, he conflates his lack of property, and subsequent need to work, with a need to eat: ‘If I had property, I wouldn't have to use my brains…I'd just enjoy. But I can't eat and so I think.' (This sentence also startled me when I re-read the book: one of the hardest things for me to deal with, as I've moved away from my hunger, is how I still find it so difficult to think, to write, to work, after I eat; how my thinking feels so much sharper, more vivid, when I'm hungry. I know I've said this to my doctors: I can't eat or I won't be able to think.) It is Jonathan, after all, who introduces Teresa to the idea of frugality, before he leaves for London, concerned as he is with always showing the world the bootstraps by which he has pulled himself up.

Most important of all, however, is Stead's presentation of eating as an erosion, a wearing away, not only of the body, but also of will, hope, and finally, recuperatively, of despair.
When, in England, Teresa and Jonathan become lost on a weekend hike (mostly due to Jonathan's self-righteousness) and are forced to spend an evening sleeping through a storm in an abandoned mill, Teresa finally sees him for the callous person that he is. She ‘release[s] him from her will' and ‘the harness of years drop[s] off, eaten through.' It's a remarkable choice of words, ‘eaten through', and one that seems, suddenly and subtley, to close the cycle of hunger and destruction that has been plaguing Teresa for so many years.

In fact, Teresa has been physically recovering since her arrival in London, again in those perilously small increments, helped along by her new freedoms and independence, the kindnesses and attentions of colleagues, a new lover, a release from poverty and its attendant need for parsimoniousness. These are all slow and slight changes in and of themselves, yet they somehow accrue to give her the clarity to be able to cast Jonathan off (and reading this, the second time, gave me a thrill of hope). On its own, hunger does not lend itself towards epiphanies, even though it promises to do so. The metaphysical is impossible without the physical, though hunger desperately tries to convince us otherwise.

What I admire most about Stead's portrayal of Teresa is how her illness is never made unambiguous, indeed, it is never named. In all of her years of walking, Teresa does not recognise that anything has shifted – although she knows that her body has been devastated, she never thinks that she is
doing anything other that what she has to do to get through. Teresa's hunger is deceptive, and her denial is complete – and this is not despite, but all the more so because she is so fierce and wilful a woman. It was deceptive for me too: I was managing the physical cause of my vomiting by cutting out the foods that triggered it, preventing it from happening by barely eating at all. I couldn't see, for years, that there was anything wrong with this, that it was any different from someone allergic to nuts avoiding eating pecan pie.

More than this, because of the way I'd thought about my hunger, my denial of my denial, the way the shifts were always so small that I didn't see them happening, I never recognised that there might be a way to write about falling under its spell, without pinning some clear progression or false awareness to the process. But Stead manages this, for Teresa, by keeping her largely unaware of the process – although the trade off for this lack of acknowledgment may well be that Teresa's hunger, or more precisely, her anorexia, is easy to miss in any reading of the book. By my second reading of
For Love Alone,
I was simply more attuned to it.

For people like Teresa it takes so long to realise that hunger is no longer an act of will, even though it is, perhaps, that willing for something else. Teresa's willing is a want to live for love, and by love alone; it is a willing to live by word and thought and not by bread and body.

IN BOOKS II

 

 

 

 

 

T
here are books that I've had with me in hospital waiting rooms that I can never re-read without re-reading, too, the traces that they carry of the spaces that I took them into. I once borrowed a book that a friend had brought back from the six months she'd spent living in a commune near the Margaret River in Western Australia – there were crusts of red dirt that fell, at times, from the gutters of its pages. I think of my waiting-room books like this. Crusts of hunger, the crusted-over time spent sitting, waiting, trying not to think or look too much. I read poetry in my first frightened visits to the outpatient clinic, after the doctor I'd started seeing, for what I still thought was simple anxiety, managed to convince me that the specialists there could help me restore my bony body, and to convince me, more remarkably, that checking in there was my own idea. I read Dorothy Porter's last collection,
The Bee Hut,
shot through with poems about hospitals and death, Emily Ballou's
Darwin Poems,
about bodies, disfigurements and death, as I sat picking at the skin around my fingernails and avoiding the eyes of the other patients. These were poems of longing and a strange, anticipatory loss, and they seemed to fit me in a way that so few of my clothes, at that time, did. Whenever anyone walked in to the waiting room, those of us already sitting would run our calculating gazes along their body, not even trying to disguise where we were looking. I'm not as sick as her, I remember thinking, so I'm okay.

In that same waiting room, three years later, when I began the process of trying to secure a second day patient admission, of trying to convince the program directors that I was ready and able to change, that I could follow their rules to the letter, that my physical condition was stable enough not to interfere with their procedures, I was carrying my brokenbacked copy of Tim Winton's
Cloudstreet.
I had reopened the book for the memory of Rose, the only daughter in the flailing Pickles family, who grows sick and hard and thin shortly after she turns sixteen. The receptionist laughed at the post-its I'd left waggling out at all angles through the book as I took my shoes off, waiting to be weighed.
Happy 16th, hope you enjoy it, love from Mum
is written on the flyleaf. At sixteen, I had been well, unlike so many of the women and men I'd met in these overheated, pale green corridors. At sixteen, I didn't know what lay ahead.

I'd already re-read
Cloudstreet,
I read it for the second time in that year when I first became ill; like
For Love Alone
it had been set as an Australian Literature course text. When I last read about Rose Pickles, who had started vomiting after meals at age sixteen I thought she didn't mean to do it either, that she too was at the mercy of a body doing things that she couldn't understand. Winton phrases it like this: ‘Rose didn't mind the sight of food these days…But whenever she ate more than a few mouthfuls she vomited it straight back up again, just like she knew she would.'

That line, ‘just like she knew she would' deceived me, for years, because I too knew that I would throw up after I ate certain foods – I still do. I didn't recognise Rose's selfdelusion because it was too similar to my actual experience.

I've since found out, reading medical histories and practitioner books, that in the years when anorexia was first medicalised (first as a form of consumption, then as hysteria), most patients reported initially ‘going off' their food because eating caused them indigestion or stomach pain. I've since learnt that the stomach contains more nerves than the spinal cord, that it can feel and agitate with all the emotions that we usually ascribe to the heart, that it's the first part of the body affected by emotional distress, or stress, or trauma. Perhaps it's in the stomach that we fall in love, that we yearn, that we become heartsore and heartbroken, sick at heart. And yet I know my physical illness is not a metaphor, that the misfiring nerves
and muscles of my stomach mean as little metaphysically as a broken bone or virus. It's just so tempting, at times, to try to make it all make sense, to give a shape to my disease, proscribe (even prescribe) a meaning.